Black-on-black buttons make getting out of dark car difficult

Sunday

Sep 2, 2007 at 12:01 AMJun 29, 2009 at 11:38 AM

I hoped Sue had a pack of six Jalapeno-Cheze-On-Cheze snack crackers stashed her car's map box. If I could find the knob for the box, I'd check. I've already discovered I can't get out of Sue's car. I worry I might starve to death before dawn.

oped Sue had a pack of six Jalapeno-Cheze-On-Cheze snack crackers stashed her car's map box. If I could find the knob for the box, I'd check. I've already discovered I can't get out of Sue's car. I worry I might starve to death before dawn. I hope Sue might go to her morning exercise spa meeting, then to her scheduled massage, then off to an afternoon lunch, then shopping for bland saltine crackers in lieu of the savory crackers I buy her.

Sue's car doors open from the inside with black levers installed in black recesses in black interior panels. On this moonless night, I can't see the release lever at all. I Brailled the door. I located the window crank, the arm rest, the decorative mouldings, the trim edges of the door's interior panel, the speaker grill. I've opened the door in daylight 87 times; I know there was a lever.

Sue stores her car's flashlight in the trunk instead of beside the seat where a doofuss (that's me) expects to feel it. To get to the flashlight, I'd have to open the door, walk to the back of the car, open the trunk, fish out the light from the "milk crate." Though close by, Sue's flashlight was useless to me. I'm trapped in Sue's Marginal 960 LQ Coupe.

I bought a DVD player, a tape player and a television, each with the identical problem carefully designed in at the factory. The housings for all the devices are molded of matte black plastic. Every control button sets in the black face of the equipment. If I get a bright light and shine it across the buttons to create shadows, I can perceive a box, arrow, circle, double-arrow or lightning bolt shallowly molded into each uniformly tiny matte black plastic button.

The minor variations for black-on-black control buttons are tan-on-tan buttons. I have to guess what to push to operate my photocopier, equally the blue-on-blue buttons on my cyclo-computer. Sue's blender has white-on-white control buttons, the icons of what speeds the buttons invoke are invisibly molded into the housing instead of the button tops.

The design fiends responsible for this fundamentally faulty equipment believe they're saving their companies millions of dollars each production run. Just one color plastic saves us perhaps as much as 7 cents in the retail price of the typical hundred-dollar gizmo. If I could find my solar-powered calculator here in the dark, and if it didn't have all the buttons molded in the same color as the case, I'd compute the exact penny we save for accepting ebony-on-ebony control buttons and show it to you. Keeping this penny in our pocket is supposedly more beneficial, compared to spending the next five years squinting to find the right button for OPEN, FAST FORWARD, OFF, CHANNEL UP, VOLUME, PUREE or MENU.

Starting Tuesday, I am coming out with a complete line of stickie-onies for control buttons. I will supply my millions of customers with sheets of glue-on arrows, double arrows, boxes, triangles, horizontal lines and vertical lines. I'm also going to make and sell self-glowing stickers to glue on car door interior release levers.

I hope Sue comes out onto the carport tonight or early tomorrow morning, opens the door and asks, "Why are you sitting in the dark in my car? I heard you drive up an hour ago."